Monday, 17 August 2015

For a few week's now I've been struggling with a particular scene in Duce. It's a new scene I needed to add to the story because I realised that while there were several external conflicts threatening Dante and Carlos (dealing with the thriller part of the story), there had to be internal conflicts to drive the romance between the two of them.

I knew what I needed to do but I just couldn't picture the scene in my head. For days, each time I tried to write it, I couldn't write more than a sentence at a sitting and it was beginning to get frustrating.

So I decided to break down the scene. This particular scene was in Dante's perspective and I knew he wasn't a happy man. Something bad was happening and he had to let it happen. He had to put 'business' before his personal feelings.

How does he deal with it? He locks himself away in a room and turns on music.

What kind of music would he listen to? I knew instantly it was classical and I had this flash in my head of the scene from Hannibal where he goes to the opera. So I went searching for the track on Amazon Prime Music and found it. It's called Vide Cor Meum, composed by Patrick Cassidy for the movie Hannibal and it's based on Dante's 'La Vita Nuova'.

I listened to it while I started typing the scene again and amazingly the words flowed. In that one sitting I wrote about 3000 words where I'd been struggling to write 30 words previously. So thank you to Patrick Cassidy and Hannibal for curing my writer's block. I'm writing again.